What You Give

“May I go to the bathroom?” I asked Mrs. Koebke, my second-grade teacher. Permission granted, I stepped out of the classroom and carefully closed the door just in time to see Mr. Skagerberg raise a two-foot long heavy wooden paddle and smack it down hard on a little boy’s backside. Across the wide corridor from where I stood a large window framed the view into the principal’s office. Mr. Skagerberg raised the paddle and struck the child two more times with all his apparent strength. The boy’s screams and the cracks of the paddle echoed through the principal’s closed door and out into the open space where I watched, a lone and horrified witness. Holding the writhing boy by one arm Mr. Skagerberg, red in the face, hollered, “What do you have to say for yourself now?” Shrieking was all the boy had to say. I raced to the bathroom, hoping Mr. Skagerberg hadn’t seen me. Now that we lived in town my sister and I no longer took the bus to school. We walked roughly a mile, about a 15-minute walk. Every morning we left our house early enough to get to school on time, but then we backtracked two or three lots up the street to meet up with three of the Jorgenson kids and sometimes with their neighbors, the pretty girls with the hung-over mother who yelled at her daughters from her bed while we waited in the doorway. After seeing the punishment our principal was capable of, it killed me to have to wait for our friends’ moms to dole out lunch money, or to wait for jackets to be donned. I goaded, cajoled and urged my sister and our schoolmates to hurry. To make matters worse, Carlyn and our neighbors talked as they walked instead of focusing on the primary goal: avoiding a paddling for being late. My vigorous gait was supposed to motivate them, but instead it frequently gave them something to laugh about. Since I was the only one who actually saw Mr. Skagerberg use his paddle, I was the only one who believed he most definitely would use it on us. To allow for an earlier departure to school I started getting up at 5:00 AM to put our family’s breakfast on the table. By 5:05 I was dressed for school. By 5:10 I had bacon frying in the pan, the orange juice poured, and the breakfast table set. By 5:15 I began hounding my parents and sister to get up. My sister had as much riding on a swift start as I did, but she was nearly as cranky as my parents about this early awakening. The plan came to a head the morning I accidentally stuck a wet thumb in the electric toaster on the kitchen counter. The voltage of the toaster wasn’t enough to do more than prickle, but already wound up with anxiety I let out a high-pitched scream. Dad dashed into the kitchen wearing nothing but his briefs. “Get back in bed right now! Don’t get up until I tell you to!” he roared. He could have let it go at that, but he added a whipping with a belt for emphasis. In all fairness, he didn’t put much snap into the swing of the belt. I guess he didn’t expect my fearful screams to be as penetrating as they were. Maybe he worried they would wake our landlady who lived downstairs. Nevertheless, I now was damned if I got up early, and damned if I got up late. I never walked to school with the other kids again. I lit out on a run to school by myself for the rest of the time we lived there. A person never knew who would turn on them next.